Making a Significant Difference in the Balance of Power

The world’s peoples have spoken loud and clear: Stop the US-Israel Genocide Now!
How do we definitively challenge the corporate governments, their multi billion dollar profit machines, which promote and drive the war on the Palestinian people?

Many lessons need to be studied and learned from the overturn of apartheid in South Africa and the task of overcoming apartheid in Palestine/Israel.

In the struggle for South African freedom, the world’s people stood on the side of humanity, on the side of justice, and exercised their collective unity to bring the apartheid system to an end.

One of the lessons, we learned is how the world’s people obstructed the complicit corporations and governments profiteering from South Africa’s apartheid, with the tools of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

Throughout the 1960s to 1980s, cities and towns throughout the globe banned South African goods from their offices and schools. They also banned South African sports teams from its playing fields.

Many unions announced an end to pension-fund investments in companies with South African subsidiaries. Labour unions, student organizations and other public bodies continued for dozens of years of a campaign against the human rights abuses of apartheid South Africa

I came to Canada in 1994 in time to celebrate the official end of the world-hated regime of apartheid on April 27 with the election of Nelson Mandela to the Presidency of South Africa. It was then that the movement for Palestinian freedom blossomed in Toronto and promoted the tools of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

What is BDS? Simply, Today it’s a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, Justice and equality. It is a social rights movement, anchored in the Declaration of Human rights. BDS is a world movement BDS that urges united meaningful action to pressure Israel to comply with international law.

The world’s peoples, in contrast to their complicit governments, are determined, as proven by the repeated daily and weekly demonstrations these past seven months, demanding a cease fire.

Israeli apartheid has persistently bombarded Gaza with its end goal of destroying all of Palestinian society.

We must not stop insisting that Canada’s so-called leaders, including Justin Trudeau, take immediate steps for a cease fire and to unconditionally stop the genocide.

The situation in Palestine today cries out for us, unionists, students, and ordinary people, to organize effectively for immediate, meaningful and impactful actions.

We are millions and that is our power. We have the ability to stop the governments, the corporations who profit by the US-Israel goals.

We should act in addition to demonstrating our love and loyalty. We should demand that our organizations use the tools of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions.

Boycott Divestment Sanctions is intersectional. BDS allies with movements against anti Semitism, against Black racism, Islamophobia, sexism, anti Queer discrimination, and for Indigenous rights. Palestine freedom is part of the intersectional movement.

Our focus should be to dismantle and ban military manufacture and distribution of equipment, machinery, and bombs that are killing the thousands of innocent civilian’s day-in and day-out. Our Palestinian people are prevented at the point of machine guns and non-stop bombings from accessing food and medical needs

These social justice movements could also use BDS and in that way strengthen world justice against racist complicity.

I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, and understand the system of hate first hand. Hitler’s war against the Jews aimed to eradicate our history and the Jewish people. Nazism Is hatred of the other – it is racism. Colonialism was Hitler’s nationalist program to conquer land for Germany.

Israel apartheid seems to follows in those footsteps.

The government of Israel does not speak for the Jewish people of the world. Zionism is the political ideology of the Israeli nationalist movement to establish a homeland for only the Jewish people. It is that racist ideology that created apartheid.

Judaism, the religion and its traditions, does not stand for racism.

Conflating Zionism and Judaism is an unforgiveable crime against the Jewish people, a crime against the Palestinians, and a crime to humanity.

I was saved from Hitler by world solidarity. I was among the thousands of Jewish children in France who were saved by the solidarity of the Jewish resistance, communities of Christians in Southern France, and the peoples of the world united against Nazism.

Today, Jewish people continue to feel deeply about the Nazi Holocaust and the attempt to destroy and eliminate us. There is anti-Semitism and there is Islamophobia, and there is hate. But all that hate is encouraged by the media owned by corporations who make their profits on colonial projects.

We are opposed to the Israeli system of apartheid. To be against Israel’s policies is not anti-Jewish. It is not anti-Semitic. We claim the Palestinians as our sisters and brothers. We are all humanity. We say: “Not in our name!”

Jewish people are in the forefront of the struggle against Israel apartheid. Many of us  recognize its Nazi methods of today. Jews are also in the forefront against the attempt of the US and Canadian governments and its agencies to eliminate the Palestinians from our conversation.

There is a witch-hunt in Canada today against the Palestinians and their defenders This is part of a global organized effort to mute and terrorize courageous people who speak out for the freedom of Palestine.

The US-Israel genocide is parallel to this witch hunt with the same goals: To erase Palestine in its entirety from the world.

Sarah Jama, the independent MPP of Hamilton, Ontario invites us to wear the Keffiyeh, symbol of freedom for Palestine. It is also generally recognized a piece of clothing worn by peoples in the Arab nations. Prohibition against wearing the Keffiyeh is an attack on Palestinians, Muslims, and Arab peoples.

We are all affected by this imperial effort led by the US and Israel apartheid.

We will defeat Israeli apartheid by the solidarity of the world’s peoples. All of the freedom movements globally will be impacted and learn with this solidarity.

We must act collectively through our organizations, choose a target and be strategic. The complicit governments, their financial institutions, and corporate heads will feel our might

End the Occupation. Freedom for Palestine. Freedom for Humanity. The world will be built on new foundations.

Rabbi Rosen of Tzedek Chicago hosts Suzanne Weiss, author of ‘Holocaust to Resistance’

Here’s the video record of a talk I gave September 2 hosted by the Tzedek congregation in Chicago. Thank you to Tzedek congregation Rabbi Brant Rosen, my friends Linda Loew, Guy Miller, and my life partner, John Riddell for organizing this event.

Rabbi Rosen says: “I urge friends to watch and listen to the special program, attended by participants from across the country, Canada, and beyond…. It’s a powerful conversation with Holocaust survivor/activist Suzanne Weiss, who shared her story of wartime survival and discussed how she applies it to the solidarity struggles of today.”

As reviewer, Naomi Allen says of Suzanne Weiss’s memoir: It is a “Thrilling and sometimes harrowing account of her life, from war orphan to immigrant to socialist activist, can be read almost as a catalog of liberation struggles from the post-World War II era through the first decades of the 21st century…. Reaching deeply into her Jewish heritage, she pulled out the traditional solidarity of Jews with oppressed people everywhere, paying tribute to her parents’ sacrifice as part of their struggle for human values. Thus, she understood that her support of Palestinian human rights flows directly from the best values of her Jewishness…”

Here’s the video:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=738959426952382&extid=SR4rLxpcRXwKZ9kc

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: From Holocaust to Resistance w/Suzanne Weiss. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

Watch the video on my presentation featuring my book: Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey – (you can purchase it from Fernwood Publishers).

Interview in: Sada Almashrek

by Hussein Hoballah

Suzanne Weiss, Jewish advocate for Palestinian human rights and author of “Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey” (Fernwood, 2019), contributed the following response to our questions in Sada Almashrek, an Arabic-English publication in Montreal.

Though the “anti-Semitism” narrative is today being made bait at large to hit back hard on any criticisers of Israel, outspoken Weiss says she, like many other Jews, refuses the Israeli authorities’ unjust treatment and supports, instead, al-Quds Day, as well as collaboration with Muslims to fight real anti-Semitism and any other form of racism.

Mrs Weiss says that her activism on behalf of Palestine is based on the principle of “universalism” found in both Jewish and Islamic faiths.

Now nearing eighty, Suzanne Weiss still enjoys a strong memory of major global incidents that have shaped today’s injustices and is therefore determined to make a difference.

1) Mrs Weiss, it is amazing to read your book Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey, and learn about your personal journey, so would you please briefly share some background info on it?

When I was an infant child, a Jew in France under Fascist occupation, the Nazis targeted me to be killed. After the Nazi defeat, I wondered how I had survived. Over the decades, I pieced the story together: my survival was the work of a broad movement of solidarity that saved many thousands of other Jewish children.

Continue reading Interview in: Sada Almashrek

Survivor Discusses Why She Embraces Left-Wing Politics

Below is an appreciation of a talk I gave to the meeting of If Not Now, an organization of young Jews against Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

By Barbara Silverstein

Canadian Jewish News,  February 7, 2019 

Suzanne Weiss

Suzanne Weiss was born in Paris in 1941, during the German occupation. Her Ukrainian father was a prisoner of war. Her mother, a left-wing Polish refugee, was deported from France in 1943 and died later that year in Auschwitz.

Weiss was one of thousands of Jewish children who were rescued by an underground network of Jewish and gentile groups. They placed these youngsters with families and in children’s homes throughout southern France.

A long-time political and social activist, Weiss spoke about her experience as a young Holocaust survivor and her 2017 visit to Auvergne, the region where she was hidden, in Toronto on Jan. 31. The event was organized by IfNotNow Toronto – which is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, building a Jewish community that values inclusivity and justice, and challenging community support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank – to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On July 16, 1942, French police arrested 13,150 Jewish refugees. They were herded into the Velodrome d’Hiver (Vel’ d’Hiv) and soon after sent to extermination camps, Weiss recounted. “Almost all of them were killed. Why was I spared? I have pieced the story together.”

She and her mother, Faiga Berliner, escaped the “Vel’ d’Hiv round-up,” and headed south, but they ended up in a German transit camp with other Jewish refugees. Weiss was smuggled out and eventually placed with a family in Auvergne, a region in southern France governed by the Vichy regime.

“Faiga had to entrust me to a left-wing Jewish organization. They placed me with a nursemaid, a non- Jewish nanny,” recalls Weiss.

Jewish parents like her mother “understood that they had to hide their children.… A network of anti-Nazi resisters saved the children by dispersing them.”

Some were sent to live with gentile families, while others were placed in orphanages. “They were hidden in plain sight of all,” she said.

These French villagers and clergy risked their lives to save Jewish children. A network of organizations provided stipends to the gentile families and institutions, to care for the children, Weiss explained.

The Buchners, friends of her father’s who were in the Jewish resistance, also looked out for her, Weiss said, pointing out that an important mission of the French Jewish resistance was to save Jewish lives.

She still does not know the name of the family, or even the village, where she was placed. “I remember nothing. I was on a peasant farm with a family who had wanted to adopt me,” she said. “I owe my life to the hospitality of that family.”

Weiss did, however, recall that after the war, she was located by her father, Aron Itzkovitch. One of her first memories is of her desire to remain with the French family. “They fought to keep me. I was unwilling to go,” said Weiss. “He took my arm and pulled me away.”

He returned her to the Jewish community and died shortly thereafter. She lived in a Jewish orphanage in Paris for five years, until she was adopted by the Weisses, a left-wing Jewish-American couple.

“I was brought up with people in the orphanages who promoted justice, love, peace and solidarity. That was their Judaism,” she said. “That was my Judaism. I believe that was the Judaism of my natural parents. It was the Judaism of my adopted parents. They were against segregation, apartheid, the death penalty and fascism.”

When she visited the French town of Clermont-Ferrand, in the Auvergne region, in 2017, Weiss took the opportunity to thank the people of that area for their bravery, solidarity and generosity.

“During the occupation, they accepted a diversity of refugees. The people of Auvergne saved the lives of thousands of people,” said Weiss.

“They wove a fabric of solidarity and built a long chain to save lives and change the course of history.

“We have to apply the same humanity to refugees and those fleeing authoritarian regimes.”

https://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/survivor-discusses-why-she-embraces-left-wing-politics

Celebrating the Palestinians and Freedom of Speech

Today, June 1, was a great success for the Al Quds rally which gathered more than 1,000 people in support of Palestinian freedom and free speech. I was honoured to be one of the speakers. Here is what I said:

My name is Suzanne Weiss. I am a Holocaust survivor. As a Jewish infant, I was marked down by the Nazis for death. All my life I have worked to prevent another Holocaust through pursuit of social justice and free speech. We meet today in the cause of human rights for the Palestinian peoples. Their lands are seized, their homes destroyed; they are confined by walls and checkpoints; they are arbitrarily jailed. In Gaza – they suffer a brutal and murderous blockade without the medications, water, and food needed to enjoy life.

How can we help put an end to these evils?
Through the global campaign to end Israeli apartheid. A campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli government! To end apartheid, we have three demands:
** End the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
** Let the exiled Palestinians return to their homeland.
** Grant equal rights to all in Israel- including the Palestinians.

Some tell us that to speak of Israeli apartheid is hateful. Some want to make it a crime even to say the words “Israeli apartheid.”
But we must speak the truth. It is Israeli apartheid that is the crime. The call to end Israeli apartheid is a non-violent effort to achieve justice and reconciliation. The call to end Israeli apartheid affirms our hope and trust that the Israeli people, like the Palestinians, will come to embrace an agenda of equality. Our goal is for Palestinians to be free to pursue their dreams in their homeland, in equality and reconciliation with their Jewish sisters and brothers.

I welcome the efforts of the Al-Quds organizers, our Muslim and Palestinian friends, to achieve this goal. Al Quds explains the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Al Quds seeks to overcome anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian prejudice. They say “Judaism yes, Zionism no!” These efforts deserve constructive engagement, dialogue, and respect for free speech.

In this spirit, we say: “Free — Free Palestine!”

Down with white supremacy!

Suzanne at mic 2 15-10-17There was a wonderful rally of several thousands in Toronto on Sun., Oct. 15, 2017 at which many leaders of the community called for unity against white supremacists and racism.

Below is the speech I gave.

Down with white supremacy!

The Nazis killed my mother, Fajga Berliner, in Auschwitz because she was Jewish and therefore subhuman. That’s Nazi white supremacy in action. My mother was among its tens of millions of victims.

We join today against this poisonous doctrine. White supremacy was expressed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a violent racist rally two months ago. Imagine! That rally got encouragement from the U.S. presidency. Shame!

The racists in Charlottesville brandished the symbols of Nazism: swastikas and  hatred of Jews. What does this mean? Continue reading Down with white supremacy!

Resisting Fascism: A lesson from Auvergne

 A talk to Ideas Left Outside, August 5, 2017

suzanne-berliner and mother
Suzanne and her mother, Fajga Berliner (1943)

In the winter of 2017, I received an invitation to spend a week giving media interviews and talks to high-school students in Clermont-Ferrand, the main city in Auvergne, a rural area in Central France. My topic was how I had been hidden in Auvergne during the Nazi occupation almost 75 years ago. The initiative came from the main Jewish organization there. They had heard of me during a previous visit to Auvergne, when reporters tracked me down for interviews. Continue reading Resisting Fascism: A lesson from Auvergne

Six three-minute speeches …

I’ve learned to make concise and cogent speeches in the three minutes appropriate for rallies and meetings. Of the several dozen “three-minute” talks I have on file, here are six examples.

Against Islamophobia and white supremacy

The video version of this speech made a  rally against Islamophobia and white supremacy went viral and received over 26,000 views as of this posting.

I speak today as a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. Nazism took the lives of most of my family and six million my Jewish community. I and so many other Holocaust survivors are here only because of people united to protect us.

What is anti Semitism? It is simply the hatred of Jewish people. Amazingly, Donald Trump honoured the Holocaust by omitting, and in essence denying history. He forgot to mention that that six million Jews were murdered in the attempt to eliminate the whole Jewish people. It’s amazing that we heard no one object to this omission, and we especially did not hear a peep from Israel who prides itself on building a Jewish state. Continue reading Six three-minute speeches …

Against Islamophobia and white supremacy

The video version of this speech made a  rally against Islamophobia and white supremacy went viral and received over 26,000 views as of this posting.

I speak today as a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. Nazism took the lives of most of my family and six million my Jewish community. I and so many other Holocaust survivors are here only because of people united to protect us.

What is anti Semitism? It is simply the hatred of Jewish people. Amazingly, Donald Trump honoured the Holocaust by omitting, and in essence denying history. He forgot to mention that that six million Jews were murdered in the attempt to eliminate the whole Jewish people. It’s amazing that we heard no one object to this omission, and we especially did not hear a peep from Israel who prides itself on building a Jewish state.
What is Islamophobia? It is the hatred of people who believe in the Islamic religion. Continue reading Against Islamophobia and white supremacy

My personal historical research finds current resonance

9 October 2015 – In September I accompanied Suzanne Weiss on a research trip concerning the work of anti-Nazi resistance in France 1940-45 to save Jewish children. Suzanne’s work took an unexpected turn, becoming part of present debate on attitudes to refugees. Here is her report. For the French text, see Europe Solidaire. — John Riddell

Toronto, 1 October 2015 –  Last month I visited Auvergne, a farming region in central France where, as a Jewish child of two, I was protected from the Nazis by a peasant family. It was the third time I had gone there with John Riddell, my husband, to find out where and how I had been saved from the Holocaust.

To my surprise, this time reporters sought me out for interviews to learn my story. How am I connected to Auvergne? Why was I interviewing villagers? Why did I seek the place where I had been hidden? Continue reading My personal historical research finds current resonance